So we are a little late in posting. But Raj and I are at SIGGRAPH 2013 in Anaheim, CA. Raj has a full technical paper and an ETech demo on Aireal. The Aireal project is a new low cost, highly scalable haptic technology that delivers expressive tactile sensations in mid air. It is getting some great press, and is a really exciting demo.

Projection mapping is really just a subset of a larger beast called augmented reality. Augmented Reality is the concept of altering our sensory perceptions in some way, usually such that the virtual and physical are combined. Most effort is focused onto augmented our visual perception (e.g. through projection mapping).

This proof-of-concept prototype uses a lot of the ideas that we’ve seen in projection mapping. However, it dynamically adapts to the appearance and geometry of the room (captured by Kinect). While the video has a “Hollywood” touch, it shows the actual real-time prototype (no special effects added in post-production).

Here are a couple videos out of Disney Tokyo (one looks like the official release and the other is a first person view):

A couple of the folks on this piece were also involved with “The Legend of Jack Sparrow” (which if you haven’t seen, hit the jump, it’s very cool). Yet another congrats on the awesome stuff coming out Imagineering!